The Gift
by SilverCascade
Summary: How terrible and beautiful to love what should not be loved. Sugar/Queen. One-shot.


**Can the spice-rose**  
**drip such acrid fragrance**  
**hardened in a leaf?**

**~H.D., "Sea Rose"**

* * *

When she walks, her body whispers. Every step is a hitch in the breath of her glide, and every soft murmur emanating from her tentacles is beautiful.

At least, that's what the girl has always been told. The Queen, as she's known to her sparse and shy subjects, is the epitome of benevolence, of kindness, of safety. It's the most important part: the Queen keeps them safe, and they worship her for it.

So the Elsen stay happy and the Guardians stay content and the cat-faced merchant, whom the girl will befriend, stays accepting. She is hesitant, at first, to agree to such great words without any proof. But when off-white grains become her domain and the girl loses everything else to become her namesake, Sugar gains indifference. As long as the chests of substance make their way to her - so high, so delicious, so sweet - she is content. Enoch doesn't protest much, and when Zacharie tries to question her habit, she asks him to leave, always speaking softly.

When Vader visits her, much time has passed. She can't state just how much, but the amount is enough, just right to allow such a call. In the same way she doesn't know how she knows the Queen's name, she doesn't know quite how they converse.

They don't speak, not the way she does when talking with the Elsen, haggling with Zacharie, or even demanding another dose from Enoch. No, when meeting the Queen, every thought is theirs together. The whispers in the air are thick and meaningless and entirely caused by Vader's writhing body. But the words in their minds are stronger and clearer than the crystals which Sugar so loves.

The Queen gives her many things, one of which is a gift she can touch and hold between her smooth fingers, fingers that will later be calloused from unrelenting training. The puppets are small and agile, and to Vader they are nameless, simply manifestations of entities that are partly her and partly not. Quick flicks of the wrist are all it takes to manoeuvre them. But they're wild. Her voice softens when Sugar stares at her; they leap from her grip.

"To control them takes much time," Vader thinks, and Sugar thinks it with her. The girl only looks at the wooden skeletons in her hands, the throbbing of her heart in her chest is much like the gears in the factories: it hurts to breathe there too, where the air is so full of yellow smoke.

"Why me?" The unanimous thought doesn't surprise her. Vader knows their thoughts better than her own; she becomes them, she is them.

Though the womanly figure has no face, Sugar detects a splash of darkness, an opening amongst the grey that looks like a smile. The sonata of her body changes; her orchestral, controlled limbs brush each other, hissing and whispering and muttering, pulling together in a solemn finale. It opens a level of feeling the girl didn't know existed. Sugar smells death.

It invades her mind, black-green curls of burnt crystals, caramel-gold bubbles, and the thick, acrid smell of processing throws her balance. She loathes the factories, and Vader knows this: the smell of death, of burnt bodies and blackened hearts, of machinery and white oil, of endless uncertainty.

Her gentle arms, three on each side, hold the girl as she falls.

"Zacharie, he says I am-"

"He is wrong."

"He won't dance with me."

"Is that what you seek?" Greyness binds her, a soft lover's embrace, and holds her at arms length. Sugar wonders what the Queen sees, if she sees anything at all. The arms holding her feel everything, and fear travels from one body into another, where it is soaked up like oil in the old days, like sugar is now. It feels like the meat fountains of Alma course through her own veins, but for the sake of the girl, for the sake of the boy, for the sake of her husband, the Queen allows it. Just this once, she will say what she means. "I trust you."

Images of the pedalos fill her mind, of the hulking ducks assigned to ferry the citizens, so weak and flimsy, through their coarse domain. She tries to stop the flow but the Queen has broken all walls. When her head falls under the flesh - they say it's cows but it doesn't feel like cows it doesn't it doesn't - she gasps. Globules of fat and strips of skin and flecks of flesh enter her mouth. Swaying against the form holding her, raising her from the ground, Sugar's hands clutch the quivering sides. Vader is silent. She absorbs all Sugar no longer needs. It aches, but nothing aches more than the hole unfilled in her chest, and until he comes back, it will remain empty. It is for the greater good he is no longer around. It is for the greater good she has to bring him back.

Sugar stands taller once the spoiled oil leaves her, but in due time her bow will return. Hazy with desire, her eyes look out through a silvery fringe, wanting everything; the feel of those limbs against her hot, hot skin, to know just how she could feel so much want for a creature who doesn't even know how to love. Vader is not human, and never can be.

Chewed up and spit out, Sugar feels the smouldering liquid leaving her veins as Vader leaves her company. She thinks she is full of courage now, but she can't be sure: she doesn't know what courage is. "Thank you," she says aloud, but the Queen is gone. Her message, a wavering aria in her thoughts, is clearer than everything else. It's clearer than even the crisp breath of darkness against her cheek.

Some false kiss is all it takes to create a believer.

By the time she dances her final dance, she learns love is bitter and bubbling, a sticky vat of smoke and caramel. After ignoring everything Zacharie tells her during her endless training, she thinks of an apology. Her feet tap to no rhythm. And when she sees him, the only one whom the Queen loves and could ever love, her brittle heart snaps.


End file.
